The Myth of Progress

Two historians sat beneath a chart of rising life expectancy and disagreed about what the line actually meant.

'By almost every measure, health, literacy and violence, humanity has improved, and the trend has held for centuries.'

'The numbers have risen, I agree, but rising numbers and genuine progress are not the same thing.'

Sorenson, an optimist, treated history as a long, uneven ascent out of misery.

'Societies that adopt science and trade have tended to grow richer and freer; that pattern is too consistent to be an accident.'

'Consistency is not proof of causation, however; the sunrise reliably follows the rooster, yet the rooster does not cause the dawn.'

Bianchi, a skeptic, suspected that the story of progress flattered the people who told it.

'Every age has believed itself the summit of history, and every age has been mistaken.'

'I concede that confidence can be blind, yet surely a child who survives infancy today is better off than one who did not two centuries ago.'

'Better off in that respect, undeniably; but improvement in one dimension does not entail improvement overall.'

The argument turned on whether progress is a single arrow or a bundle of separate, sometimes opposing, trends.

'The same industry that lengthened our lives has warmed the planet; the two are not merely correlated but causally entangled.'

'That is precisely why I distinguish progress from its costs; a gain is no less real because it brings new problems.'

'Humanity has always paid for its advances, and has usually found the payment worthwhile.'

'Usually, perhaps, but the ledger is not yet closed, and the largest bills may still be coming due.'

What looked like ascent from one vantage point looked, from another, like a gamble whose stakes keep rising.

'We tend to notice the diseases we have cured and to forget the ones our way of life creates.'

'And yet we should be careful not to mistake nostalgia for wisdom; the past was not a garden we were expelled from.'

Both agreed that technology changes the world; they disagreed about whether change deserves the honourable name of progress.

'To deny all progress is to insult the generations who fought to end slavery, disease and famine.'

'To assume all change is progress is to excuse whatever the powerful happen to be doing next.'

The word progress, they saw, smuggled in a judgement about direction that the mere facts could not supply.

'Data can tell us that things have changed; it cannot, on its own, tell us that they have improved.'

'On that I agree, which is why progress is finally a moral claim, not a graph.'

Neither abandoned his view, yet each had learned to hold it more carefully.

'Progress, if the word is to mean anything, is not something that happens to us but something we must keep choosing.'

'And a choice, unlike a law of history, can always be made badly, or reversed.'

If progress is a story we tell about the past, then everything turns on who is allowed to tell it, which is to ask, in the end, whose memory becomes history at all.